These are not really the largest ship ever built, just the largest container ships. The Knock Nevis was a full 200 feet longer and 30 feet wider, and many in-service ULCCs are larger. The triple-E has a capacity of 165k DWT, where the 'standard' size for VLCC supertankers is 280k DWT. The first Triple-E was launched in 2013, so I don't know why they're talking about this like it's a future event.

The Bush administration was running on the hope that the secrecy of their widespread wiretapping and the technical hurdles to encryption would result in few people using encryption. Which, of course, is exactly how it worked. Once the public became aware that the government was monitoring literally every phone call, text, and email, the public backlash has greatly expanded encryption. Don't imagine that a republican administration would be any more willing to let you keep your communication private. They might use different tactics, but secretly putting back doors in software is not really any better than a public campaign to install government backdoors in software.

Personally, I think one of two things is going on here. 1) The administration actually is trying to gauge or influence people to accept the Glasshouse in exchange for "security." 2) Encryption is a red herring, and an actual counter based on a different technology/strategy has already implemented.

If I hire someone, the last thing I want to hear is "I can write this program for you, but only if you license my existing patent." People leave jobs for greener pastures all the time. People have outside interests. If the job I'm offering can't hold your interest, then I'll find someone else. If you use your employment to try to extort IP fees from me, you better damn well expect to lose that employment. And probably expect a lawsuit to recoup any wages or signing bonus already paid.

If you also tell me that your password is a semantically valid English language phrase, then the vast majority of those 9e34 combinations can be excluded. So, "Love is beautiful, like birds that sing." is less random than "reconform uncharitable caldera poorly" The phrase is easier to remember; has more characters, but is drawn from a smaller space.

I would love to see a password validator that just runs some of the common dictionary attacks on the password, and tells the user how long it took to break. If it breaks within 10 seconds, or 30 seconds, reject the password. People are terrible at estimating randomness, but giving them direct feedback will help them understand what really makes a hard to guess password.

The question whether this increases or reduces security depends on what kind of attack you expect. If you expect to be specifically targeted, by a human being that can gain access to your personal space in such a way as to read the notes on your keyboard or cubicle walls, then writing down passwords is Bad. Making a conspicuous display of user/pass combinations could certainly make you a specific 'target of opportunity.' But if your primary security concerns are compromise of some bank/website's database or scripted attacks on internet services, then it hardly matters if a physical representation of your password exists, and it really helps to have different codes.

I imagine that any decent system, once it finds a valid user/pass combination, promptly runs off and tries that everywhere: every bank, every ISP, every email service, every social networking site, every game server. Site-specific passwords will hugely reduce the damage due to a successful hack. Storing your user/pass combinations on a hackable device might not be the best solution, but for most of us semi-anonymous internet denizens, a system that a human would rapidly recognize may still defeat a script.

He has, at best, a device that generates excess heat. That's a long way from generating excess electricity. Or energy in any saleable form. Now, one might argue that extracting the heat from such a device to run a steam turbine (or some such) is simply an engineering problem, but it's an engineering problem that has well-defined losses associated. If his excess heat isn't greater than the conversion losses, then his device is still pretty useless.

Curiously, the troll believed to be targetting Medeleine McCann's family was found dead in a hotel earlier this week

Are you sure you're reading that wiki right, dude? It sure looks like they're claiming that Rome defined corporate entities as separate legal structures with their own liability in the mid 6th century. The unlimited liability the wiki refers to seems to be specific to UK law, and especially to companies created by royal charter, as the establishment of modern stock-based corporations was followed rapidly by the Limited Liability Act.

That's because you can't create permanent jobs from temporary funding. No individual researcher has the power to create a tenure-track position, because those positions are created by the university. In the case of state universities, tenure track positions come directly from the state budget. Over the last 40 years, states have uniformly decided that providing a college education is not the state's job. State allocations have not kept up with inflation or student body growth. Since 1980, universities have had to meet a 95% increase in student body growth in parallel with a 40% decline in state funding. They've done this by raising tuition and hiring non-tenure-track lecturers.

Research is amplifies that trend. Research grants are nominally to the university, but they will generally move with the principal investigator. Research grants actually take away from faculty's ability to teach classes, and the shortfall is made up by hiring temporary, non-tenure-track lecturers. So, now you have the state commitment to long-term faculty being bought out with short-term contracts.

If you want to increase full-time, tenure-track faculty growth, you need to get state taxpayers to commit to the socialistic principle of state-funded education, raise taxes, and hire faculty. Research contracts won't teach your children.

Your minimal-government-intervention solution is for the government to force the incumbent ISPs to lease their privately-owned infrastructure to their competitors, and at government-regulated prices? I am interested to see how you justify that as a lower regulatory burden than forbidding the prioritization of packets based on origin.

Most cable companies pass those user fees on to customers explicitly, "Regulatory Recovery Fee." Obviously, all expenses of the cable company are eventually paid by subscribers, but they choose to account for those right-of-way fees in the same way as they account for the Universal Connectivity Fee and State Sales/911 Tax, as though it's not a part of their doing business.

They can deliver you 10 MB/s even while they throttle the connection between you and Netflix to 2 MB/s or less. This is, in fact, what was done during the "negotiations." Bandwidth is throttled upstream of the client link, so the client, if he tried, could run a "speedtest" in parallel with his crappy, stuttering video, that would show healthy, full-bandwidth connection to other upstream sites. He could, if he tried, see a perfectly fluid Hulu video in one window, next to a crappy, stuttering Netflix video in another. The client has no way of knowing whether that's because Netflix's servers are overloaded, Netflix's ISP is overloaded, or if Verizon is throttling Netflix: they all look the same to the end viewer. This also makes it essentially impossible to determine fraud (aside from the fact that your contract with your ISP does not - can not - guarantee you a bandwidth to any particular service.

That's fine for the client ISP and the server ISP, but their packets will traverse an unknown number of intermediates whose networks are completely out of the control of server, server's ISP, client, and client's ISP. In fact, one of the internet design principles is that the physical network is unreliable and subject to congestion. This is unavoidable: traffic grows to fill the available bandwidth, and during times of peak demand, every network can be congested

This is why the internet has different protocols. Compare Email and VOIP: for VOIP it is essential that each packet be delivered, in order, and as quickly as possible. Delays of even 100ms create audible distortion. For email, your message is still understandable if it's delivered 5 minutes late. SMTP has that resiliency built-in: if it fails to deliver a packet right now, it will keep trying, periodically, for a day. Eventually, it will find a time when the network is uncontested and it can transfer that terabyte attachment. If your VOIP packet has to wait around until SMTP has delivered that attachment, you're going to think someone has hung up on you.

I know, now that everything is a browser plug-in, that it's easy to forget that HTTP is only one of many protocols on the internet. It's completely appropriate prioritize RTP/RTCP (VoIP) over SMTP or FTP. The problem is when an internet middleman decides it should be able to prioritize YouTube's HTTP over Hulu's HTTP, just because YouTube has paid a ransom.

No, that's not ok. Email is already a best-effort service without guaranteed delivery. If the S&R team actually needs a particular piece of information delivered immediately, they should choose a service that is optimized for that purpose. It's not the job of every internet middleman between here and Beijing to rank the moral value of each IP packet or source.

Note that this is different from an ISP determining that an email source is "spam" and blacklisting that source.

Aside from the technical fact that the client only finds the ads in the web page text, it is (again) not appropriate for the internet middlemen to determine whether the client is more interested in images from doubleclick or images from slashdot. If the client chooses to prioritize which images it requests, that's a completely different question. The point of net neutrality is that, within a recognized communication stream, people who transfer the data should not look at the data to determine whether or how quickly to forward it. The post office accepts your letter, looks at the postage you've paid, and delivers it. It will deliver my Priority Mail envelopes faster than my Media Mail envelopes, but it will not deliver Netflix Media Mail envelopes faster than my Media Mail envelopes.

Legitimate packet prioritization is based on the service, not on the vendor. "Quality of Service" is already part of TCP/IP, and lets routers know how to balance latency and throughput. For example, it is more important to deliver VOIP or streaming video packets on time than to deliver SYN/ACK packets quickly. You should let VOIP packets skip ahead of SYN packets or FTP packets. However, it is not appropriate to let Verizon VOIP packets skip ahead of Nextiva VOIP packets, just because Verizon has paid for that prioritization.

Common carrier rules mean that the carrier can't discriminate among its clients, they can still distinguish between "First class" and "Book rate" services.